Munchy Mondays Restaurant Review – Miss Moneypenny’s

Well here we are again, back in sunny ol’ Queensland and it’s time to eat.
Tonight I’ve decided to visit Miss Moneypenny’s on Hastings street in Noosa Heads.

Upon first glance, this restaurant seems like the freshest thing to hit Noosa since flip flops, it’s got a super funky exterior and it’s open design screams modern and super trendy.
The place is illuminated well but softly, and even the restaurant name is written above the restaurant in a clean, bright sign in a classy font that gives you the confidence to walk under it and decide everything is gonna be alright.

I came in and was seated by a waitress that sounded German, which is always a wonderful experience as Queensland is notoriously overpopulated by Australians.
We were seated and offered drinks, and this is where the good times were finished. The drinks took just under 15 minutes to arrive, which isn’t the worst time that I’ve had, but it’s not good either. Although they were prepared in cool looking glasses, and were decorated nicely with fruit pieces and tasted quite nice.

Waiting to order the food took quite a while as well, it was longer than I would have liked but I dealt with it because I was with my brother and we were enjoying our drinks and each other’s company.
However after we had eventually ordered our food, this is when the wait truly began.

The worst thing about waiting a long time for your food in Australia is that your drink isn’t replenished, once it’s finished your done unless you want to pay for it again. This is unheard of in America.
Each time we ordered food or drinks our waiter changed, this isn’t good because they can’t charm us this way and attempt to get to know us and improve our dining experience. The waiters seemed barely present, it was difficult to get their attention, and they never seemed to remember who you were.

Watching other tables I noticed the waiters seemed to lack basic waiter training as they placed people’s food down awkwardly, overlooked messes and crumbs building on people’s tables, refused to take away used dishes and God forbid they refill a glass.
The strongest observation I have of this restaurant is that it seems as if every waiter is working their first shift after being hired with no experience, simply because they have super cool accents.

After an hour the food arrived and after it did I had the pleasure of biting into the worst Hawaiian pizza I’ve ever had in my life.
I have a few weaknesses when it comes to food, and they are that at it can’t resist ordinary flavors. I love vanilla ice cream, I enjoy plain toast, and I order Hawaiian pizza. I really like Hawaiian, so much in-fact I’ve had it in 5 countries in 4 continents. (Australia, China, United States, Mexico, Bahamas) and this is the worst I’ve ever had.

It’s tomato sauce was the very definition of bland, I truly believe they used raw and unflavored tomato paste as this is the only way pizza could ever taste this way. It had as much toppings as you’d find on a generic frozen pizza, with crust as floppy as spaghetti.

It was a great burden forcing this pizza down, but honestly I did so because my brother was paying for the meal and I felt really bad being ungrateful, particularly because this horrible thing was apparently worth a small fortune. So putting on a brave face I seemed to enjoy it as to not spoil the night, but it was awful.
10 minutes into eating however, my brother confessed his rib eye steak wasn’t very good, so I was free to admit the case with mine as well. His ‘medium well’ steak had been cooked rare as rare and was bleeding everywhere, and to add insult to injury the meat had been cut to roughly the size of a golf ball. Not good.

When we’d finished as much as we could, we tracked down a waiter by getting up and finding one (by now disillusioned that one would ever visit us organically again) and paid far more money than the food was worth.

We then walked back out under the fantastic sign and beautiful entrance way, and felt somewhat tricked by what had been such a beautiful set-up.
The restaurant which I ate at in Melbourne, ‘Pacinos’ had received a bad review because it had terrible ambiance and waitstaff, but wonderful food. This restaurant ‘Miss Mineypenny’s’ had wonderful ambiance, terrible waitstaff and some of the worst food I’ve had.
So in conclusion this restaurant is awarded 2 out of 5 stars for my experience there.

Join me next week for another Munchy Mondays review! So far we’ve reviewed restaurants in Queensland and Melbourne (both in Australia.) and also a restaurant in China. Next week I’m reviewing a restaurant at sea while aboard the Disney Dream as a guest aboard the beautiful Disney ship. Until then, join me again tomorrow for an update on my Queensland adventure, as I kill time before heading to the States. See you again, real soon 😉

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